Darwinian Brainstorming

I’ve always attributed a huge part of Omniture’s success to our customers. We’ve been extremely fortunate to not only forge relationships with the most innovative brands online, but they’ve also been willing to share their problems with us, and collaborate on a solution. It is this—our customers’ willingness to bring us their problems—that has fueled our product roadmap for over a decade.

One of the places you see our interest the business issues with which our customers struggle is in the closing session of Summit (our annual customer conference). Every year I give our customers a quick accounting of the progress we’ve made on our product set over the previous year, and try to reserve the majority of the time for customer feedback. We turn up the house lights, put some microphones in the audience, and listen to customer suggestions one by one. After spending a little bit of time going back and forth to make sure I understand what the customer is suggesting, I’ll then ask by a show of hands, how many others in the audience also feel that (given our always limited resources) this is something in which Omniture should prioritize an investment.

While this is not the most significant way we get feedback from our customers, it has always been the most popular. In fact, one of the suggestions I took from the audience last year was, “I’d love it if you’d figure out a way for us to interact with Omniture like this for the other 364 days of the year we aren’t in this session.”

SHAZAM! Earlier this week we announced the Omniture Idea Exchange—a web application infused with the nougaty goodness of that closing session of Summit, and available at your fingertips whenever you choose to mash out ideas.omniture.com into your favorite browser. Using the Idea Exchange, you can not only submit your requests, suggestions and ideas to Omniture, but just like that closing session of Summit, you can also get peer feedback on how sensitive this particular issue is for other organizations. While I’m sure we won’t be able to implement all the suggestions (even if ALL of you “raise your hands”– but I’m sure you know that rule by now 🙂 ), it serves as a tremendous resource in understanding what we can do to make your lives better and we will continue the long tradition of executing them as best we can.

Response thus far has been tremendous. So great, in fact, that a friend of mine recently suggested that if I could just get Kevin Spacey to stand in for me at the Summit parties, I could pretty well consider myself deprecated. While I’m not sure I completely grok the KS reference, I’m really thrilled by your quick acceptance of the Idea Exchange. Thank you for all your support over the years, for your patronage, and most of all, for being willing to share your problems.